CHAPTER II

SUMMARY OF BOOK
Main Book
DEVELOPING THE CURRICULUM
1. Focusing the course
One of the key issues in course development is how specific the course should be in
terms of target audience. Courses titled EGAP and Business English can be considered 'wide
angled' because they are designed for classes focused on broad academic skills or a reg- ister
which encompasses many subfields including market- ing, accounting and management.
Conversely, courses titled English for Nursing Studies and English for Accountants can be
more specific as they have been designed for learners who have a particular type of academic
or work environment in mind. A wide- or narrow-angled course design can also be based on
decisions about grouping learners. For example, if 30 health professionals were to come to a
language school, which approach would be better: to divide them into three groups according
to proficiency or to teach a wide-angled English Skills for Health Professionals or Medical
English course at all three levels? Is there such an entity as 'Medical English' and, if so, might
descriptions of it be simply too broad to be of much interest to any of our health care
practitioners? Similarly, are there entities such as Business English and Academic English
and are descrip- tions of them too general to interest people working in different branches of
business and students from their various disciplines? Hyland (2008) questions the 'widely
held assumption that there is a single core vocabulary for academic study irrespective of
discipline'.

2.Determining course content

In ESP a distinction is drawn between real content and carrier content. Real content
denotes pedagogical aims, such as the features of language the learners will hopefully
become more aware of or be better able to produce. Carrier content denotes the means of
delivering the real content. These means include the use of texts or activities to 'carry' the
content of interest. Cowling (2007) describes how findings from a needs analysis were used
to plan the syllabus for a series of workplace-based courses in Japan.
For example, one unit in the course is titled 'Describing Products and Services'. The
syllabus specifies discourse/language items for this unit (such as, 'engaging the customer' and
'present- ing selling points') and cultural content on 'directness and gestures'. Parkinson et al.
(2007) report the development of a reading and writing course for foundation year students in
a South African University. The course focuses on developing academic literacies and, as
Table 4.1 shows, is organized around four genres including the laboratory report and the
essay. The developers were guided in part by findings from needs analysis but also by
theoretical considerations such as the value of integrating reading with writing.

3. Developing materials
Authentic texts play an important role in demonstrating 'real' language use. If we aim
to demonstrate to nursing students the forms and features of nursing care plans, we would
generally wish to show the class samples of authentic care plans. Texts written by journalists
could possibly be used if they were written for communicating financial or economic ideas
and information. Editing is always an option as is 'skeletonization', whereby ellipsis or some
other 'place-holder' device is used to eliminate dense content chunks. Swales makes a case for
the occasional use of 'instructor-written' materials and provides two suggestions for how
these mate- rials can be developed.The first suggestion is for the materials writer to create
texts and The second suggestion is to create an imaginary student's response to the
materials.

4. Evaluating courses and materials

The subject of evaluation has been relatively lacking in the ESP literature (Gillet and
Wray, 2006; Cheng, 2006). There is a need to 'fill the gap' by looking at research that has
attempted to provide evidence that EAP courses are helpful. Course evaluation in ESP
focuses on evaluating perceptions of effectiveness and assessing learning not only at the end
of the ESP course but also in the light of subsequent experiences in the target field. A number
of interesting ideas for evaluating EAP courses can be found in the reports in the volume
edited by Wray and Gillet (2006). Martala (2006) used both questionnaires and samples of
students' writing to evaluate how well a pre-sessional EAP programme equipped Chinese
students for postgraduate studies.
The remainder of this section discusses two studies focused on assessing learning in
EAP contexts. Some EAP courses are entirely genre-based, many focus at least in part on
genres. Discussion of learning in this kind of instruction has been limited. Cheng (2006): The
ESP approach to writing instruction. still remains an approach which privileges the analysis
of learners' target genre needs but has relatively little to say about actual learning by the
learners.Students in the first group received individualized feedback on the form (grammar
and lexis) and content (legal argumentation and structural components) of their memoranda.
The second group received only one set of comments on the quality of their writing. The first
group appeared to have greater awareness of their audience and of the genre-specific
conventions of the US legal discourse community' (p. iv). Second study attempted to gauge
learner response to and learning from a set of materials Crandall had developed to teach EAP
students the speech act of requests in academic settings.

Comparison Book

NEEDS ANALYSIS AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT IN ESP

1. Introduction
The role of needs analysis in English for specific purposes (ESP) is to establish the
"what" and the "how" of a course, followed by curriculum design, materi- als selection,
methodology, assessment, and evaluation. These stages should not be seen as separate, but
rather as interdependent overlapping activities in a cyclical process. Needs analysis entered
the ESP literature in the 1970s as a formal concept and during this decade was largely viewed
as what learners are required to do with the foreign or second language in a target situation.
The concept of needs analysis, hand-in-hand with an underlying theory, was established by
the Council of Europe. The type of information sought during a needs analysis is closely
related to the approach to teaching and learning followed by the ana- lysts.
2. Sources and Methods

What sources and methods are used to collect data in needs analyses for ESP? Long
(ed.) 2005 for a thorough discussion and bibliography of needs analysis studies. As the ESP
teacher is more often than not the "non-knower," unstruc- tured interviews with domain
specialists would seem a good way to deriving categories for follow-up survey questionnaires
or structured interviews. Other methods for needs analyses in ESP could largely be seen as
designed to collect ethnographically oriented information to gain an insider's view of the ESP
situation. These would include detailed, longitudinal observations of the setting, focus group
discussions, and analyses of participants' diaries and journals. Ethnographic analyses can also
usefully be supplemented by text-based analyses of the target genres.

3. Needs Analysis in English for Academic Purposes (EAP)

Needs analyses in the academy tend to take a skills-based approach at the macro-level
and will be discussed from this perspective below. Reading, listening to lectures, and
participat- ing in seminars and discussions figure far less in the literature. Early EAP syllabi
for writing were often derived from the material writer's own intuitive conception of needs
supported by research studies on analyses of the target domain. The use of needs analysis to
describe a tool for gathering data about institutional expectations is problematic for several
reasons. First, it conflates external require-ments and students' desires as if they were
congruent, not possible areas of study.
Second, it hides the ideological battles that go on in academic life around curricular
decision-making by highlighting only the outcome of those charged with making deci- sions.
Swales takes a more accommodationist, pragmatic approach with the primary aim of
acculturating students into the disciplinary discourses of their field, while at the same time
conceding that the EAP is no longer politi- cally and culturally neutral (Swales 1997).
"Rights" might also be conceived in terms of allowing students the right to choose their own
tasks, as in the case of the negotiated syllabus. One unexpected reaction by some students
was their anxiety about having to define their own assignments. A needs analysis focussing
on students' lacks in thesis writing is that by Cooley and Lewkowicz (1997), who carried out
a large, triangulated needs analysis through examination of student writing samples and
questionnaires.

4. Needs Analysis in English for Occupational Purposes (EOP)

In English for Specific Purposes (Orr 2002), Orr describes six case studies for learners
in the university covering various EOP fields such as law, nursing, business, and tourism.
Other needs analyses have highlighted mismatches between current EAP courses and EOP
demands. Bhatia and Candlin (2001) found a mismatch between the formal deductively-
oriented presentations common in English for business programs in the academy and the
informal inductive style in work- place situations. Dovey (2006) discusses the issue of
transferability from academic to professional contexts from the perspective of the "new
vocationalism". Concerns have also been revealed by needs analyses targeting EOP
communication for designing curriculum in the academy.
 For example, Bosher and Smalkoski's (2002) ethnographic on-site observation of
student nurses revealed an antipathy towards writing nonacademic disciplinary docu- ments.
This illustrates the importance of taking into account motivational factors and how
meaningful the tasks are perceived by students. Corpus analysis, mainly confined to EAP
contexts in the past, is now being applied to health-care communications. There are two
aspects that are recurrent themes in accounts of needs analyses for EOP: internationalization
and the use of English as a lingua franca. International scope of English was recognized in
the 1970s for the transmission of science and technology and internal/international
communication, in other words, tailored "to the outside world" (Johns and Price- Machado
2001: 43